I’ll read anything Connie Willis publishes. In addition, she’s a writer who goes right to the top of my reading list when I get a new book of hers. That’s a small list of authors for me, but Willis has proven time and again she’s at the top of her game, and it looks like she’s going to be there for a long time.

I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land, unfortunately, is not her strongest work. For an author who excels at characterization and complex plots, this novella feels oddly straightfoward, and is even rather heavy-handed. Our narrator, Jim, a professional blogger whose expertise is supporting obsolescence (?), stumbles across what he thinks is a bookstore while trying to escape the rain in New York City. The rest of the story is Jim discovering the secret behind the bookstore (which holds hundreds of thousands of books, which his guide continues to tell him aren’t for sale).

The thing is, Willis makes it obvious what that secret is, so we’re along for the ride while his guide goes on a rant about how libraries get rid of books that don’t get used, or how people throw out old books because they don’t see any value in them, or how books just waste away over time. As a reader, I understand where Willis comes from in that argument; as a librarian, though, I don’t understand what she expects libraries to do. She delivers a passionate argument, but she doesn’t offer any alternatives to weeding a library collection, other than to create a fantasy library that solves the problem she sees. I was never hesitant to discard materials from the library when they no longer served a purpose (seriously, who needs a book on DOS 3.0 in the 21st century, or a book about professional frisbee players from the 1970s?), so the point of this novella didn’t hit the mark with me.

Despite that, this novella is exactly what Willis fans would expect from her. It contains books, has a lovestruck character, and a large part of the story centers on a comedy of errors. It’s just not her best work. Compared with the brilliance of Doomsday Book or Bellwether or Lincoln’s Dreams, Traveller falls flat because it doesn’t contain those elements that best define her books. Existing fans will devour the story, and enjoy it, but I can’t help but feel like they’ll finish the book wanting to re-read one of her earlier, better works. This novella is like hearing the cover of a favorite song on the radio and wishing you could hear the original instead.

"'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"